Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [3]
What you did to Florita was bestial.
He slowly shut the door, as if he wanted to disappear little by little, and for ever.
He spent most of his time in Manaus. He went by tram to the office and worked even when he was asleep, as he himself used to say. But he often came here. My father liked Vila Bela; he had a morbid attachment to his home town. Before I lived in the Saturno, I’d been two or three times to Manaus on holiday. I didn’t want to go back to Vila Bela. It was a journey in time, going back a century. Manaus had everything: electric light, telephones, newspapers, cinemas, theatres, opera. Amando only gave me enough change for the tram. Florita took me to the floating harbour and the aviary in the Matriz Square, then we’d walk round the city, looking at the posters for the films at the Alcazar and the Polytheama, going back to the house in the late afternoon. I waited for Amando on the piano stool. It was an anguished wait. I wanted him to hug me and chat with me, or at least look at me, but I was always greeted with the same question: Been for a walk? Then he’d go over to the wall and kiss my mother’s photograph.
I thought I was condemned for ever, guilty of my mother’s death, when the lawyer Estiliano appeared in the Rua da Instalação for a chat.
He told me I couldn’t moulder in a pension for down-and-outs. He knew it was Amando’s decision, his way of punishing his lecherous son. But why didn’t I study to get into the law faculty? My father would soon change his mind.
Estiliano was Amando’s only friend. ‘My dear Stelios’—that’s what my father called him. This old friendship had begun in places they recalled out loud, as if they were both still young: the beaches of Uaicurapá and Varre Vento, Macuricanã Lake, where they fished together for the last time, before Estiliano travelled to Recife and came back a lawyer, and Amando married my mother. The five-year separation hadn’t cooled their friendship. The two of them always met in Manaus and Vila Bela; they looked admiringly at one other, as if they were looking in a mirror; together, they gave the impression that each believed in the other more than he did in himself.
I saw the lawyer with the same white jacket, the same trousers with braces, and an emblem of Justice on his lapel. His hoarse, deep voice intimidated everyone; he was too tall and robust to be discreet, and drank whole bottles of red wine at any hour of the day or night. When he’d drunk a great deal, he’d talk about the bookshops in Paris as if he was there, though he’d never been to France. Wine and literature were Estiliano’s pleasures; I don’t know where he put, or hid, the desires of the flesh. I know he translated Greek and French poets. And he looked after the legal side of the business. Amando, an austere man, closed his eyes and covered his ears when his friend recited poems in the Avenida restaurant or the bar in Liceu Square. After Florita, Estiliano was the person nearest to me. Right till the last day.
My father would change. Right, then. I spent two years studying in the Municipal Library; at night, in my room, I read the books Estiliano had lent me. The lads in the basement laughed. The graduate from the Saturno. The man of justice. Juvêncio didn’t laugh though. He was shy and serious, a lad of few words. I left the pension when I entered the Free University of Manaus. And in the same week Juvêncio too left the Saturno. He went to live on the pavement in front of the High Life Bar, and I above the Cosmopolitan Grocery Store on the Rua Marquês de Santa Cruz. It was a spacious room with a window overlooking the customs and excise offices. In the Cosmopolitan I got to know the city. The heart and the eyes of Manaus are in its docks and along the bank of the Rio Negro. The great port area swarmed with businessmen, fishermen, colliers, dock-workers, peddlers. I got a job in a store run by a Portuguese man, studied in the morning, had my lunch in the Market and spent the afternoon carrying boxes and serving customers. Even with a tiny wage, I informed Estiliano, I was managing to pay